Loral Federal Systems is exploring the use of an Integration Services Architecture, ISA, as the basis for integrating Information Technology, IT, systems which are predominately COTS-based. The primary objective of the ISA is to lower the lifecycle costs associated with COTS systems. The ISA must address several dimensions of COTS integration including process, control and data. The ISA must also accommodate change. The system users must be isolated from the continuous impact of change in today's systems - changes associated with technology, COTS product end-of-life and business rules to name three.

In the past we have implemented COTS-based systems using ad hoc "glue code" architectures and found those architectures to be deficient in many ways. After giving consideration to developing our own ISA framework we have decided to proceed by adapting a commercially available application development and runtime environment to integrate COTS and non-COTS functions. This paper defines the requirements for an ISA framework and addresses the work required to encapsulate COTS applications in a commercial runtime environment.